The BBC has been accused of creating a ‘Hunger Games’ style show involving the poor.
Photograph: Lionsgate/Allstar

The BBC has defended a new TV reality show pitting unemployed and low-paid workers against each other for a cash prize, which has been accused of echoing film the Hunger Games, arguing it is a “serious social experiment”.

The show, called Britain’s Hardest Grafter, is seeking 25 of Britain’s poorest workers with applications limited to those who earn or receive benefits totalling less than £15,500 a year.

The five-part BBC2 series will pit contestants against each other in a series of jobs and tasks with the “least effective workers” asked to leave until one is crowned champion.

The winner will receive a cash prize of about £15,500, the minimum annual wage for workers outside London.

The format has been accused of trying capitalise on the trend of “poverty porn”, established by hit controversial series such as Channel 4’s Benefits Street, with website Graduate Fog accusing the show of “feeling distinctly Hunger Games”.

In the hit Hollywood film, which stars Jennifer Lawrence, contestants are chosen from the poorest districts of a country and compete in a fight to the death until just one survives in a hit TV show televised for the amusement of its wealthiest citizens.

An online petition objecting to the “degrading and exploitative game show format” was started on Change.org on Thursday and has so far attracted almost 4,000 supporters.

The series is being made by production company Twenty Twenty, whose credits include Channel 4’s First Dates, and which was previously responsible for Benefits Britain 1949, in which claimants volunteered to live by the rules of the first year of the welfare state.

Twenty Twenty has posted advertisements calling for participants who are willing to “prove their worth” to “potentially walk away with a cash prize”.

The BBC originally announced it intended to make the show, also referred to as Britain’s Hardest Worker, in January with promotional material explaining that “contestants are all there for one reason: to make money”.

It explained that contestants would work in jobs that will “take place both out in the workplace and within the confines of a specially created factory, a warehouse space … transformed to cover the UK’s largest blue collar sectors”.

BBC2 controller Kim Shillinglaw, who is also responsible for re-inventing Top Gear following the departure of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, said at the time that the show would look at the “low wage economy”.

“Britain’s Hardest Grafter is a serious social experiment for BBC2 which investigates just how hard people in the low wage economy work,” said the BBC and Twenty Twenty in a joint statement. “Each week the contributors – who are all in work or actively looking – will experience a different ‘blue collar’ role as the series explores the truth about Britain’s work ethic. Throughout the series, the contributors are rewarded for the work they do.”

The BBC pointed out that the show has not been made as an entertainment format but has come from Clive Edwards, head of commissioning for current affairs at the BBC.

The corporation says that the series will “tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time” including why British productivity is so low, is the benefits system providing many with a reason not to work, do immigrants work harder and have the young really not got the work ethic of their parents.

Promotional material for the show concludes: “Who in Britain still knows how to graft? It’s time to find out.”